A wide variety of computer operating systems and computer application programs incorporate, display and/or perform operations on data. With the advent and expanded use of graphical user interfaces over the last fifteen or so years, it has become possible to display increased data to a user of a computer via various graphic formats. However, due to the relatively limited real estate available to the user interface, sometimes a label for a respective object may be positioned further away from its intended or target “owner” object or positioned so that it may appear to overlap another object so that there may be some confusion as to what the label is associated with or referring to. In the past, to attempt to overcome this problem, the label for an owner object has been positioned in a predetermined relative direction away from its target or owner object. For example, a topological node label can be positioned to the south of its respective “owner” node icon. Unfortunately, this technique may not adequately use the available screen real estate and/or may inhibit a user's ready recognition or cognizance of what object belongs to what label. Thus, there remains a need for improved graphical user interfaces that allow users to more readily discern the relationship between two objects without unduly cluttering the display.